Pointy heads and bleeding hearts

By Michael GordonMay 3 2002

Don Watson compares his time as Paul Keating's speechwriter, adviser and alter ego to being in the trench during a bitter, bloody war. "You never really get over it and you're a little bit damaged by the experience," he says.

This helps explain why it took more than six years for Watson to complete Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, his portrait of the last Labor prime minister. It also accounts for the metaphor of battle that tends to punctuate conversation whenever Watson is asked about his time with Keating.

For three or four years, he could not bring himself to work on the project at all. It wasn't, he stresses, that it took this long for him to recognise the flaws of the man he still admires or the government he served.

"It's just that I felt less willing to concede them because we were under such heavy attack," he says, over a coffee at his home in Fitzroy. "I'll still defend the (Keating) government, but probably a little more rationally than I could have five or six years ago.

"But for at least two years and maybe more, it would have been unbecoming to have written it, to have abandoned the group as it were, and the ambitions."");document.write("

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When Watson did start writing, he struggled to find the voice to tell his story.

"I began wanting to write it like a fly on the wall and the first chapters were written without the first person, with me as an observer," he explains. "But in the end it was impossible because you ended up being too precious. You were involved. You were in there every day and the modesty became a species of preciousness which was worse than vanity. It just couldn't be done."

Then he opted for the first person, but that too carried difficulties. "One of the hardest things was trying to maintain the voice and the point of view without sounding like a kind of egomaniacal rave - to keep it as my point of view, but without it looking as if nothing happened that I didn't have a hand or foot in. That would have been quite false."

Briefly, Watson flirted with the idea of annotating the diary he kept from the day he joined Keating's staff as speechwriter in 1992 until election day in March 1996. But, aside from the fact that this was not what the publisher, Random House Australia, had paid him a big advance to produce, the diary was incomplete and this approach would have taken even more work than to write the narrative as originally agreed.

So, while the project hung over him like "a big black cloud", Watson immersed himself in other tasks. He wrote a film about Ned Kelly called Fanatic Heart, focusing on the character of Joe Byrne. It has not been made yet, but he describes it as "the best thing I've ever done". He also wrote The Man Who Sued God and Passion, a film about Percy Grainger, the eccentric, sadomasochistic composer who died in 1961.

But in the end, the book had to be written and it took all the willpower Watson could muster to complete the task. If it was a cathartic experience, it was also a punishing one.

"It was like every day walking into a maelstrom of my own making. And it only got deeper and deeper and more and more horrendous," he says.

Asked if there were times when he considered returning the advance and walking away, Watson offers a wry grin. "I think there's a lingering Protestant principle in me that says never give an advance back - work it off if it kills you. But there were times when I could understand why authors in more romantic ages had killed themselves, why poets had cut their throats."

The result is what Watson calls a book written from the trenches. "It's like I was there and this is what happened as I saw it," he says. "It's not the heroic history of the Keating government. I could not have written such a book. It's not within my skills and, in a way, the close-up, more personal thing interested me more.

"It's like the difference between a big Constable landscape and a Jackson Pollock - and this is much more like a Jackson Pollock, I suppose. It lacks all definition. It's carried sometimes by emotion and sometimes by reason and logic, but often it's carried in the way that politics is carried, by one incident bumping into another, into another, into another and by trying to get some of the humour."

Like the time he looked up from his desk in the Prime Minister's office in Parliament House to see Courtney Walsh, the formidable West Indian fast bowler, who happened to be in town for the Prime Minister's XI cricket match, standing in his doorway. "He said something like, 'Where do I find da tall blond girl, man?' 'Down the other end,' I said, 'But she's gone home'."

But however it is carried, the book is a masterpiece. It may have taken a long time to complete, but Watson has crafted simply the best inside account of life, politics and combat inside the highest office of the land ever written.

It is a book primarily about Keating, but it is also about politics, communication and the central policy debate of the last 20 years - the contest between the "pointy heads" (for whom market forces reign supreme) and the "bleeding hearts" (those drawn together more by their opposition to economic rationalism than by any other common ground).

As Watson writes: "In the name of the people, the bleeding hearts were likely to sacrifice policy purity; in the name of policy purity, the pointy heads would sacrifice the people. Bleeding hearts were said to be disposed to panic; among the pointy heads, paralysis was common."

If Watson, the historian and political satirist, was the pre-eminent bleeding heart in the Keating office, Don Russell, with his tall frame and shiny bald skull, was the chief of the pointy heads, the most senior of the office economists. This was the group Watson found most perplexing.

"With sex it is not possible to lose your virginity more than once," he writes. "That is what took so long to understand about the office economists. They had lost it repeatedly over the years, yet at every new step they dug their heels in as if protecting their honour."

The competition between Watson and Russell was so fierce that it almost became physical once or twice, which Watson admits is laughable, given the frames of the two men.

The book is about speechwriting, too, and the challenge of transmitting ideas, especially when the populace has stopped listening.

"A speech is a gesture towards order and respectability in a world which prizes spontaneity and tends towards chaos," he writes. "Like life and death, no one can say why some words take root and some blow away with the wind, but it depends a lot on the media."

The draft speeches that came from the bureaucrats arrived "verbless, grey and hackneyed", and as time passed, Watson became increasingly obsessive about removing those words he could not stand, like commitment, enhancement, access and equity. It was George Orwell who complained in the 1940s that modern political prose consisted of "more and more phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse". Orwell, says Watson, "didn't know how bad it was going to get".

But mostly, the book is a portrait of Keating by someone who was by his side for the big battles of his four years as prime minister. The surprise to those who do not know him is that he has pulled very few punches. All the eccentricity, arrogance, erratic behaviour, contrariness, loathing of the establishment and, let's be frank, the madness, is there, expressed with honest eloquence and verve. Sometimes with empathy, often with resignation.

It has long been recognised that Keating was a crazy brave politician. That is what made him deadly. What Watson does is open the door on the times when he was just plain crazy, leaving it to the reader to weigh these occasions against those when Keating displayed the other qualities that distinguish him from so many others who have occupied the prime ministership: the courage, vision, wit, horsepower and the wherewithal to get things done.

He does not offer conclusions about why Keating tended at times toward self-destruction, but he does provide clues: "He became prime minister not because virtue was its own reward - (Bob) Hawke denied him that - but because he had fought and taken it," he writes.

"He was left exhausted: and worse, he had to live with thanklessness and loathing. Whatever it was in the wider world, the main game of Keating's advisers was to tap what energy remained and keep at bay the sense of grievance and frustration which often threatened to overturn his political judgement and sometimes did."

Leadership strength was the quality even his opponents conceded was his greatest asset, yet Watson recalls times early in his prime ministership when Keating in conversation would "sulkily retreat from the goals he most desired" and "slide low in his chair like James Dean in East of Eden and say the leadership thing wasn't worth a crumpet".

Later, Watson observes that without the heat of battle, Keating's pulse slowed. "Years of death-defying struggle had given him the metabolism of a cornered rat - he could not get excited until the stakes were very high, preferably a matter of life and death."

And later still, after the forced resignation of Ros Kelly and while the Coalition pursued him for his investment in a piggery, Watson writes that Keating performed brilliantly only when he felt his life was threatened.

"He was a cornered rat and a prowling dog; he was feline; he was a spider skulking in the corner of the web, rushing out every now and then to furiously bind and paralyse his victims. If you must be a spider, I said, be a spider that lives in the centre of the web."

This was a reference to another source of frustration for Watson and others in the Keating office, perhaps another legacy of playing second fiddle to Hawke for a couple of years too many.

"He seemed not to understand that he would make himself more popular and trusted if he played sometimes to the hollow centre of the job - to the ceremonial, sentimental, cliched dimension of it.

"It was as if he would not let himself think such thoughts. He knew that Hawke's personal popularity had been essential to his government's policy reforms.Yet Keating recoiled from the pursuit of popularity and trust, which is to say from the essence of politics."

Aside from the exhaustion factor, Watson argues that the toll of fighting three opponents had an impact. Of the demise of John Hewson, for instance, Watson writes: "It would take a while for Keating to find his feet with him and overcome the mourning which seemed to envelop him each time the battle was renewed - not for the life he would take but for the part of his own he would lose."

Hewson comes out of the story a little worse than the other two opponents, but Watson says this is only because he fired more shots. "The war with Hewson was ferocious," he says. "They were natural enemies and they were very evenly matched. Keating was fighting under the handicap of the recession, but Hewson had given himself a GST, so the weights were about even."

Downer's tenure, he says, was in sharp contrast and often comical. "We'd drag out all this ammunition to the front line to fire and he'd be writhing on the ground with self-inflicted wounds."

And Howard? "He was an enemy of a different kind. He knew all he had to do was make himself a small target, but we couldn't believe how seriously he was taken. He must have been pinching himself that he had so little pressure put on him. It was like fighting a wash basin or something, an inanimate object never likely to crack."W[FUDrop]atson shares Keating's view that the media gave Howard a free ride and the prime minister insufficient credit for his policy achievements in the last three years. But he also accepts that Keating stopped communicating with the media, including those who were not antagonistic towards him. "It was a bit like a marriage," he says. "They'd fallen out of love with him and he was sick of them."

It is known that Keating considered walking away from the job towards the end of 1994, when he had served the equivalent of a full term as prime minister and had ascendancy over his opponent, Downer. At the time, he was suffering from tinnitus, a condition that causes ringing in the ears, as well as acute back pain, and regular bouts of influenza.

What Watson reveals is the other factor that inclined Keating towards "throwing it in"; his failing marriage with Annita. "He wondered if this was not his last chance to give Annita and his children lives with less pressure, an existence of the kind he always wanted," he writes.

"He thought they deserved a reward for all the years at the mercy of his political career . . . He was not thinking of resigning to save his marriage, but to revive it, restore some balance to it and be fair to them."

Although Keating decided to stay, believing there was policy work to do, including the defence pact with Indonesia, and because he wanted to see off Downer, Watson reveals that he decided to buy John Laws' house on the Hawkesbury and St Kevin's in Woollahra to give Annita a sense of what life would be like after politics.

But the marriage grew steadily unhappier, prompting tension between Keating and those in the office who were closest to him. Watson was unhappy, too, sensing he was being punished for his own discontent and lack of sympathy. "I knew he was seeking kindness, not responsibilities. Ideas oppressed him as much as public duties."

In the end, Watson also contemplated quitting, suggesting the writer Christine Wallace could take his place. "I felt half-unhinged," he writes. "I had his ear, his confidence, but I could not make a difference to the political chaos which surrounded him."

But he chose to stay, as did Keating, and says the last six months were among the most productive of the four years. "I felt there was more of a creative kind of esprit de corps than there had ever been. There was a real fuse and a good team, a bit like Essendon on a good day".

As for his own view of Keating, it is summed up neatly in a single quote from an early chapter: "Paul Keating is a kind, charming, very intelligent man who would risk his own life to save yours or to get an unwanted crease out of his trousers."

What may surprise readers is that Watson makes very few judgments about those who fell out with Keating on Labor's side, like party secretary Gary Gray, or opponents like Howard, whose approach to the prime ministership is such a contrast from the "big picture" Keating was determined to paint.

When this is put to Watson, it pleases him. He has recently read Frederic Manning's book, The Middle Parts of Fortune, first published anonymously in 1930 and described by Ernest Hemingway as the finest and noblest book of men and war ever written.

"What's extraordinary about that book is that it makes no judgments about anyone really. It says this is what it was like. It's about friendship and dispute and fear and how men coped with it and the arbitrary nature of war.

"It's an old metaphor about war and politics, but that is what I was trying to do in the book: to give a picture of these big issues which were being fought by big powerful personalities and what the fight was like."